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Everyone likes the idea of a cheat mode, or "God Mode." Many years ago - I think around 1993 - Doom introduced the idea of switching a player into God Mode within the game by typing IDDQD. You'd then be invincible and get to feel like you'd discovered an exciting secret "easter egg" in the game. How exciting the the developers hid this for us to find! You may have heard of a "God Mode" hidden in the depths of Windows 8 (or 7 for that matter)... and it "unlocks" a bunch of secret functionality. Let's try.

While all content is trending towards CSS and JavaScript, the core technologies of the browser, it seems a little weird to position EPUB as being a collection of things that do something different from what browsers do. The nuance might not be clear so here goes... EPUB is essentially a collection of standards wrapped up inside a zip file with a few extra bits that ‘bind’ the content together. The extra bits give metadata and information needed for books including a table of contents, etc. Most of the standards wrapped up by this zip file are standards made for, or predominantly made for, browsers.

Why the e-book standards wars are starting to feel increasinly like the old (ongoing) browser wars.

One of the toughest problems I faced when I built Notepad Classic was an issue where many functions like Go To & Find were always off a few characters. After a bit of experimenting I noticed a pattern, it was off by the number of characters equal to the line number (0 based).... It turned out that the way the string functions count a line break.

In my day job I work with a lot of very smart developers who graduated from top university CS programs such as MIT, CMU, and Chicago. They cut their teeth on languages like Haskell, Scheme, and Lisp. They find functional programming to be a natural, intuitive, beautiful, and efficient style of programming. They’re only wrong about one of those. The problem is that my colleagues and I are not writing code in Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, Clojure, Scala, or even Ruby or Python. We are writing code in Java, and in Java functional programming is dangerously inefficient.

Positioning the solar arrays on the ISS is an incredibly complex task; if parts of the arrays are in the shadow of other parts, they’ll bend due to the temperature difference and eventually break. NASA would like more power to run science experiments and other cool stuff, so they’re turning to hackers so they can optimize the amount of power generated on the ISS.

Several years in the works, the main claim to fame is that the keyboard is designed from the ground up for ergonomics. To that end, they’ve ditched the traditional layout and staggered keys in order to provide an optimized layout that offers better comfort while typing, but the changes are something that will take a lot of practice typing before you can type anywhere near your regular speed.

While many debates over technology and privacy concern obscurity, the term rarely gets used. This is unfortunate, as "privacy" is an over-extended concept. It grabs our attention easily, but is hard to pin down. Sometimes, people talk about privacy when they are worried about confidentiality. Other times they evoke privacy to discuss issues associated with corporate access to personal information. Fortunately, obscurity has a narrower purview.

One day while driving home, I thought: "Why don’t I just stop using email altogether?" That night while drifting off to sleep I imagined my email-free life. I liked the picture. Within the same week, I made the decision to cut email out of my life. Here's how it worked.

It’s that memory-scraping thing that gets me. There’s something poignant about it. You let Watson luxuriate in the hot mess of the Urban Dictionary, opening up all sorts of weird and wonderful new vistas for the straightlaced chap, and then, as soon as he says something a little bit naughty, a little bit off-color, you start cleansing his memory, washing his mind out with soap. That doesn’t sit well with me.

Nokia has just done something pretty unusual: it’s invited its users to effectively tailor an element of its smartphone hardware to their individual needs. As a Friday present for its more enterprising fans, the Finnish firm announced the release of what it calls a ’3D-printing Development Kit’, or 3DK, for the back shell of its Lumia 820 handset.

Nokia is effectively outsourcing rapid prototyping to its customers, starting with case design.

Chrome book denotes to "PC based on Chrome Operating System". The most used browser of the next year was Google chrome, and the credit goes to Indian Computer Engineer Mr.Sundar Picha, currently the senior vice president of Chrome at Google Inc... Now the time has been came when Google introduced us with a “PC based on Chrome Operating System”.
In windows OS people generally suffer from lots of headaches with the administrative –model. Chrome book is cloud based and containing zero-Administrative model.
Price:
Samsung - $249
Acer - $199

But the bad news is here, It is not available in India and not yet decided to launch it in India just because bandwidth and connectivity issues. But still one hope is here for India that some OEMs may bring it to India as independently.

Thanks
Neha Sharma
"Pay no mind to those who talk behind your back
It simply means that you are two steps ahead"
http://nehaprogrammer.blogspot.com/

My post The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C generated a ton discussion on Reddit and Hacker News, nearly 1200 comments combined as people got in to all sorts of heated arguments. I also got a bunch of private correspondence about it.
So I'm going to answer some of the most common questions, feedback and misunderstandings it's gotten.

I write a lot about website security. Sometimes I’ll publicly point out flaws in software but there are many, many other times where it remains a private conversation for various reasons. The one common thread across most of these incidents is that as developers, we often make bad security design decisions. It’s us – the organic matter in the software development process – that despite the best of intentions make bad choices that introduce serious risks.

The best way to combat risks in software is to educate developers management.

Takes time, costs money, and a dev is not a security-expert. Given time and money, quality is a given.

I've never met a project where security was ignored simply because the devs lacked understanding. Heard quite some people say "I'm not sure if this is safe", with the predictable answer that it's safe enough.

I’m learning a bit of R in my current stint at ThoughtWorks. Coming from python, I was happy to see most of the plotting functions are very similar, as well as many of the vector-level data handling functions. Besides the fact that lists start at 1 instead of 0, things were looking pretty familiar. But then I came across something that totally changed my mind. In R they have these data frames, which are like massive excel spreadsheets: very structured matrices with named columns and rows, on which you can perform parallelized operations.

PHP is not a “real” or “pure” functional language. Far from it. We don’t have a proper type system, the cool kids make fun of our exotic syntax for closures and we have array_walk() that looks functional but allows altering state. Nevertheless, there are a few interesting building blocks for functional programming.

So you had a project. You scratched your head a couple of days and came up a really nice and robust design. “The design solves the problems now and it should be able to handle future changes.” You thought that.... Two years later, the ‘future’ has come.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Japanese digital device consumers are some of the savviest in the world. So, a report Thursday showing that the Nexus 7 has bested the iPad in market share is worthy of attention.... Not surprisingly, one of the big draws of the Nexus 7 -- which is co-branded with Asus, the manufacturer of the tablet -- is price, according to Nikkei. It's about a $100 less in Japan than Apple's least expensive tablet, the iPad Mini.

In politics we often hear that every vote counts. In Reddit, we can actually figure out how much each vote counts. If I upvote or downvote a post, how far does my individual vote move that post in time?

If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 upvotes per hour...

In the last few years, many of the larger mainstays of the existing database industry have leapt onto the bandwagon. Companies like Microsoft, Dell, HP and Oracle have made many strategic and tactical moves to stay relevant with this move toward big data and nosql databases solutions. However, the leadership is still outside of these stalwarts and in the hands of the open source community.

Firefox is widely regarded as a very secure web browser, and that’s a reputation that Mozilla has worked tirelessly to build over the past eight years — blacklisting extensions, shutting down insecure plug-ins, revoking certificates, and patching holes as quickly as they appear. But even Firefox has some lingering security issues. One of those is the ease with which a third-party application can sneak unwanted (and potentially malicious) extensions into a user’s profile....

There is so much happening on the Internet during a year that it’s impossible to capture it all in a blog post, but we’re going to give it a shot anyway. How many emails were sent during 2012? How many domains are there? What’s the most popular web browser? How many Internet users are there? These are some of the questions we’ll answer for you.

We found over 3500 news posts for you in 2012... and more are on the way!

The danger of aggregating numbers from multiple sources without doing anything to sanitize differences in methodologies...

Quote:

61% – Share of emails that were considered non-essential.
68.8% – Percentage of all email traffic that was spam.

...so apparently 11% of all spam sent is considered essential.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

A parcel containing a camera is sent to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London through the Royal Mail. Through a hole in the parcel, the camera documents its journey through the postal system.

Go to https://twitter.com/bitnk/ to see some of the images (the primary website is being overwhelmed with traffic, so they're using Twitter instead for the time being).

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream. Discover.

Reminds me of when ISO 8601:2004 became available. I grudgingly paid about $100 (US) for a copy. I wasn't allowed to give anyone a copy, but I wrote up a summary of the changes and put it on the Yahoo ISO 8601 group.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream. Discover.

A good--or bad--project manager can make the difference between a project coming in on time and on budget and it being a failure. How can you spot a good project manager? CIO.com talked to experts and IT executives to find out.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream. Discover.

Less than 24 hours after Oracle patched a dangerous security hole in its Java software that was being used to seize control over Windows PCs, miscreants in the Underweb were already selling an exploit for a different and apparently still-unpatched zero-day vulnerability in Java, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.